Ippadikku Rose - Mind Blowing Talk Show

CHENNAI, India: India's newest talk show host, billed as the local answer to Oprah Winfrey, hitched up her sari and looked for her stylist's approval. "Very feminine. You look gorgeous, like a goddess," he said, smiling reassuringly, as he plaited a garland of fresh jasmine into her hair.

"The sari is the most flattering garment. It disguises manly shoulders, takes attention away from a masculine neck," he added, as the final touches to makeup were made in the studio dressing room, minutes before cameras started rolling on the first session.

A complex procedure even for experienced hands, sari tying is a particularly fraught process for Rose, formerly Ramesh Venkatesan, whose mother never taught her the skill and refuses to see her wear one. The result was flawless.

When it is broadcast to an audience of up to 64 million people in the southern state of Tamil Nadu this month, "Ippadikku Rose" (Yours, Rose) is expected to cause a sensation, introducing India's first transsexual celebrity to television.

The show's director, Anthony Thirunelveli, said the half-hour show was conceived as family viewing but would discuss issues of sex and sexuality, confronting "hush-hush, under the carpet subjects." The first nine episodes that finish recording this weekend will tackle, among other things, divorce, sex in India's call centers and sexual harassment.

The main attraction will be Rose herself, the supremely poised, 28-year-old, U.S.-educated, former Web site designer, with a masters in biomedical engineering, who started wearing women's clothes full-time four years ago and who is still waiting for acceptance from her family and society at large.

If nothing else, the show will start to propel India's downtrodden community of transsexuals, or hijras, into the mainstream. Known as the third sex, most are born male but see themselves as women. Hijras appear in positive roles in ancient Indian mythology, but modern society has tended to be less tolerant. The majority are shunned by their families, find it impossible to get conventional jobs, and turn instead to begging and sex work for a living.

"Transgenders in India are seen as immoral and evil. I will break that image by being articulate, intelligent and a bit like the girl next door," Rose, said, calmly leafing through the script of her first show - an interview with a prostitute about her recently published autobiography.

"This is a radical development. There have been transsexuals in Indian movies, but always as the object of ridicule or as villains. This is the first time in the history of Indian television that a transgender person has been featured as a television anchor."

Pradeep Milroy Peter, the head of programming at STAR Vijay television, a Tamil-language channel owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., acknowledged feeling nervous about how the show would be received.

"We don't know how much acceptance there will be. We are crossing our fingers," he said, straining to make himself heard as builders, electricians and lighting technicians hurried to finish building the set (a white sofa on a female symbol lit up with green neon lights, set against the circular, arrowed male symbol, in pink neon). "The market has a craving for talk shows, but this one comes with a difference. It's very experimental."

His anxieties are understandable. In a country where the boundaries of sexual tolerance are shifting daily, there is still much uncertainty and unpredictability about the position of the line between acceptability and offense. Fashion television was briefly banned for showing too much flesh, a film star's career lay in ruins after comments that appeared to condone pre-marital sex, and fringe political groups like nothing better than to whip up moral outrage.

The channel was not searching for controversy, but executives were so impressed by Rose's immense screen presence and confidence, and her determination to fight prejudice, that they agreed instantly to allow her to be host of her own show, despite her lack of experience.

"People here will not openly let transsexuals into their homes," Rose, who now goes by only one name, said, revealing that she had deliberately isolated herself from college friends and neighbors to avoid rejection. Her middle-class parents threw her out when she announced to a group of 40 family members, gathered to agree on a suitable bride for her, that she was not interested in women.

"I'd already grown my hair long and had laser treatment for my facial hair, but they were still hoping I'd act like a boy. There was utter silence when I told them," she said. For a while she supported herself, working as an American-accent trainer in a call center, but her contract was not renewed when she started dressing as a woman. In the hustling streets of Chennai she is always stared at, sometimes abused.

Recently she has returned to live with her parents, but the pressure to conform remains strong. "They are like, 'O.K., you are a transsexual, but don't dress like that at home and please get married.' " There is quiet hostility to the chat show project from her mother, who still hides Rose's dresses and jewelry whenever she gets a chance. Only her grandmother gave her blessings on the morning shooting started.

Rose was careful to point out that attitudes were no less hostile in the United States where she spent three years studying at Louisiana Tech University. "There, people were aggressively homophobic. America is very hypocritical when it comes to its stand on sexual minorities," she said. "Historically India was very progressive about this until the British came and imposed a Victorian sense of morality, which still remains."

Editing the program will be a delicate, tip-toed dance around invisible frontiers.

"The show will be ground-breaking, but we have to think about our audience. South Indians are very reserved, very conservative," said Peter, the STAR Vijay executive. Sex before marriage might be discussed, but only in the context of college graduates, not anyone younger. Gay rights would be tackled in the abstract, but not gay relationships.

Rose said she had no desire to shock, but just hoped she would be watched. "As a person, I am very open, but this is a big television channel which goes out to millions of people. We don't want any bad reaction," she said.

She felt it would be fine to talk about hormone therapy, and her upcoming sex change operation, but criticizing marriage, for example, was still too big a taboo to contemplate.

"If you were to ask me, I would say that marriage is unnatural and causes most of the problems in married people's lives," Rose said. "But marriage is such an established concept in Indian life, I won't be able to question it. I don't want to frighten people away, I want to reach out to them."